Seizing the Advantage: A Vision for the Next US National Defense Strategy

The Department of Defense’s National Defense Strategy (NDS), to be published in early 2022, is one of the most important documents the Biden administration will produce. As the United States confronts a range of multifaceted and simultaneous security challenges, the 2022 NDS will provide a blueprint for navigating these threats and revitalizing US global leadership.

In this latest installment of the Atlantic Council Strategy Papers series, Forward Defense’s authors articulate their vision and recommendations for the next NDS, including clearer prioritization, investments and divestments, reposturing of US forces, and a focus on transnational threats like climate change and hybrid warfare.

While the 2018 NDS reoriented the Pentagon’s primary mission toward strategic competition among major powers, the threat landscape has continued to evolve and worsen over the last four years. China and Russia have dramatically modernized and expanded their conventional and nuclear forces, while increasingly engaging in hybrid warfare activities below the threshold of armed conflict to undermine the United States and its allies. Regional aggressors such as Iran and North Korea continue to conduct malign activities, and violent extremist organizations, pandemics, and climate change pose a severe threat to the US homeland and US interests abroad.

The Department of Defense (DoD) needs a clear roadmap to counter these myriad challenges. Seizing the Advantage lays outs four key proposals that will have the most impact on achieving US national security goals:

1. The DoD needs to respond where competition with China and Russia is taking place today, by playing an enhanced role in gray-zone competition, alongside other departments. The DoD should engage in hybrid warfare—both offensive and defensive—consistent with American values.This strategy paper articulates the concept of a competition continuum and puts forward recommendations for the DoD to shape the information environment and compete in cyberspace.
2. Future conflict will require better integration of all US military services and will take place on land, at sea, in air, space, and cyberspace, and across the electromagnetic spectrum. It must also be conducted in close coordination with allies and partners, who collectively comprise one of the United States’ greatest advantages vis-à-vis its major-power competitors. This Strategy Paper articulates a new operational concept, the “Combined Warfighting Concept,” for the United States to deter conflict and succeed on this future battlefield.                                                                                             
3. The Department of Defense must build the force to dominate the data-centric, networked, and fast-paced armed conflict of the future. While kinetic and non-kinetic weapons will make it easier to destroy targets, finding those targets will be the more pressing challenge, and therefore wars of the future are likely to be won by the side that can best harness available data and deny the adversary the ability to do the same.This Strategy Paper articulates clear investment priorities to build that force—and divestment priorities to afford it.                                                                                                         
4. The Department of Defense must rebalance its global force posture away from a focus on Central Command in the Middle East, and toward other potential flashpoints in the Indo-Pacific and Europe. The era of numerous, long rotational troop deployments to Central Command is over. Instead, a balanced posture model would move needed forces to strategically-important theaters and would rely on a more tightly linked, or “latticed,” defense structure with allies and partners, which would mitigate risk from the US rebalance.

READ THE REPORT to learn more.